.htm_cmp_tabs010_vbtn.gif){kind=small}
Tom
Peterson
"Success emerged by shifting to leadership by service, not by command."
____________________________
Bradley County Courthouse and Lost Creek were crash and burn experiences. They contained the lesson that public resource managers who think they have the right to do things any way they want risk getting their management plans kicked back in their face. These experiences taught me that people need a chance to see, feel, and come to believe all the information that relates to their issue. To come to their own new understanding, not just be told to accept our understanding. In these two cases most people in the agency thought the issue was about deer. The real issue was about self-determination. When these Arkansas deer hunters participated in an open, fact-based discussion, the light bulbs start coming on in their minds. They came into the issue with one mind set but reached new conclusions. Lasting solutions emerged from the agency and these hunters, kind of, re-meshing their gears so separate perspectives started evolving together. . .
I think our ability to turn things around after the Bradley County Courthouse and Lost Creek failures came, in good measure, by using a lot of patience. This is the business concept of a conceptual sales cycle—how long it takes to get somebody to change their mind and buy your product. In the 1960s IBM was a pioneer using this concept. In selling office equipment they figured it took eighteen months, on average, to go through the cycle of understanding customer needs and persuasion—for customers to understand the value of a new system of office equipment and then take action. IBM had the patience to do a lot of listening to what customers wanted and needed, a lot of relationship building, and a lot of educating their customers. After about eighteen months customers were ready to actually buy something.
Another business school concept that helps explain the problems we got into with the Bradley County Courthouse and Lost Creek controversies is the psychology of personal commitment. In marketing there are low involvement goods, like buying a ballpoint pen. You don’t sweat too much over that level of decision. It is different for high involvement goods, like buying a house. The support people need to make decisions about high involvement goods is dramatically different. Many times in natural resource conservation and environmental management we’re asking people to make lifestyle changes. That’s a high involvement decision. It may take a while—our version of a conceptual sales cycle and it may take support—our version of selling high involvement goods. . .
Where the purpose and systems were right I’ve seen good things happen when stakeholders are made part of the solution. . . Today the state has instituted sweeping regulatory reform by working collaboratively with stakeholders.
[The Center for Climate Strategies] helps states develop climate-change management plans. Crafting such a plan requires considerable change. The change process we use is a hybrid of corporate planning, collaborative decision making, and alternative dispute resolution. What we do is multi-party, multi-issue, science-intensive mediation.
. . .we use some guiding principles . . . The first principle is to decouple people from their own history . . . our second principle is to confer both responsibilities—problem definition and solution finding—together . . . You’ve got to be wise enough to know when somebody is saying they want collaboration when, in reality, they are just faking it. . .creating a good faith process is our third guiding principle . . . our fourth principle is to anticipate that perceptions or ploys about insufficient information will emerge as a reason to not deal with tough issues . . . Our fifth principle is leadership . . . our sixth principle—be prepared for steering behaviors . . . And our seventh principle is to maintain full transparency and full inclusion so everybody’s voices get heard and everything is up for consideration . . . If you violate that principle the discussion explodes.